Selection Quotes - Page 19

• The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things.

  John Ruskin

  Choices, Understanding, Weakness

  John Ruskin (1867). “The Stones of Venice”, p.195

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• Is there a better example of natural selection in action than 'Project Runway?'

  Jamais Cascio

  Example, Action, Natural

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• Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.

  John C. Bogle

  Risk, Investing, Individual

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• It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order - not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Order, Skills, Different

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, pp. 16-17, 1958.

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• The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friends, Book, Mean

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.112, Penguin

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• The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.

  Karl Pearson

  Men, Doe, Kind

  Karl Pearson (1912). “Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics: The Cavendish Lecture, 1912, an Address to the Medical Profession”

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• An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

  Richard Dawkins

  Creativity, Ideas, Hijacking

  "The Very Best of Richard Dawkins: Quotes from a Devout Atheist". Book by Gordon Fisher, 2014.

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• If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

  Toni Morrison

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

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• These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection.

  Geoffrey Miller

  Creativity, Poetry, Literature

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• In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity.

  Justin Rosenstein

  Organization, Creative, Intellectual

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• People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, People, Enemy

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.197, Wordsworth Editions

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• The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

  Edward de Bono

  Acceptance, Thinking, Rejection

  Edward de Bono (2009). “Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity”, p.187, Penguin UK

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• The determining trait of the enterprising (or active, or aggressive) investor is his willingness to devote time and care to the selection of securities that are both sound and more attractive than the average.

  Benjamin Graham

  Average, Sound, Investing

  Benjamin Graham (2009). “The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. If one colony member devotes its life to service over marriage, the individual is of benefit to the society, even though it does not have personal offspring. A soldier going into battle will benefit his country, but he runs a higher risk of death than one who does not. An altruist benefits the group, but a layabout or coward who saves his own energy and reduces his bodily risk passes the resulting social cost to others.

  E. O. Wilson

  Running, Country, Soldier

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• The Thoroughbred exists because its selection has depended, not on experts, technicians, or zoologists, but on a piece of wood: the winning post of the Epsom Derby. If you base your criteria on anything else, you will get something else, not the Thoroughbred.

  Federico Tesio

  Horse, Winning, Race

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• It did not take Man long-probably not more than a hundred centuries-to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection.

  James Thurber

  Dog, Men, Animal

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.955, Library of America

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• For character, to prepare for the inevitable I recommend selections from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson. His writings have done for me far more than all other reading.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Reading, Character, Writing

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• If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn't the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian.

  Douglas Adams

  Atheist, Italian, Thinking

  Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry (2012). “The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time”, p.61, Pan Macmillan

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• How Obama approaches judicial selection - and how Republicans respond - now becomes an important story and will remain so until the Senate shuts down judicial confirmations, probably in the summer of 2016 if Senate custom in presidential-election years is followed.

  Terry Eastland

  Summer, Years, Presidential

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• Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Men, Numbers

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.283, Graphic Arts Books

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• I don't often know where my ideas come from. Maybe it's the fact that I'm obsessively regimented in my analysis, borderline autistic. But whether it's bond selection or asset allocation, we can do it better than just about anybody around.

  Jeffrey Gundlach

  Ideas, Analysis, Facts

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• In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selections amongst them for the purposes of a calculating engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

  Ada Lovelace

  Essentials, Purpose, Influence

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• A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Trump, Caprice, Hypothesis

  Jerry A. Coyne (2010). “Why Evolution is True”, p.260, Oxford University Press

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• It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Exercise, Science, Discovery

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• It is much more accurate to identify the factors of production as know-how (that is genetic information structure), energy, and materials, for, as we have seen, all processes of production involve the direction of energy by some know-how structure toward the selection, transportation, and transformation of materials into the product

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Energy, Information, Transformation

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